George Bellows: a missing link in American art

The National Gallery’s acquisition of its first major American painting is a
step in the right direction, says Mark Hudson

George Bellows' 1912 masterpiece Men of the Docks is being bought for $25.5m (£15.6m) from Randolph College in Lynchburg

By Mark Hudson

9:24AM GMT 07 Feb 2014

The thing about truisms is that they tend to dominate the way we see things long after they’ve been proved manifestly untrue. One such is that there was no worthwhile American art before Jackson Pollock.

Yes, we know about Benjamin West, Thomas Eakins, the Ashcan School, Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis and the ever popular Edward Hopper. Yet the sense remains that it was all one long, dull, provincial blur before the sunburst explosion of Abstract Expressionism.

Now the National Gallery’s acquisition of its first major American painting (a fact that is telling in itself), the first work to be acquired in this country by the important early 20th-century painter George Bellows, should go some way towards changing this hackneyed view and shedding light on a whole range of artists and movements who are barely known about in this country.

Until last year, George Bellows was one of them. But a substantial exhibition at the Royal Academy last spring brought him to the forefront of public attention. The fact that we are now to have a notable work from his best period on permanent display in Trafalgar Square makes a very satisfying coda to that groundbreaking show and a major step forward in our understanding and appreciation of early 20th-century American art.

Bellows was a link figure between the sedate Europhile 19th-century art of Eakins and Winslow Homer and a tougher, more overtly American vision that paved the way for the likes of Pollock and Rothko. Born in 1882, the rangy, affable, baseball-loving scion of a wealthy conservative Ohio family, Bellows was quintessentially American in all things, apart from strong left-wing opinions and an urge to make it on the cutting edge of art. Arriving in New York, he lived at the YMCA and wandered the streets observing the vibrant, violent, teeming city of immigrants. His images of the excavations of Penn Station and monumental boxing paintings such as The Stag at Sharkey’s are true icons of American art.

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There’s a raw, picaresque quality to the National Gallery’s new acquisition, Men of the Docks, reminiscent of his literary counterparts Mark Twain and Hemingway (another lover of boxing). The rough characters loitering on the banks of the snowbound Hudson with tugboat smoke and skyscrapers rising in the distance, aren’t observed from a safe anthropological distance. Presumably waiting for work – one of them appears to be relieving himself in the snow on the left – these are the kind of people Bellows engaged with in his breadline existence in the Big Apple.

There’s a willingness to get down in the rough-necked flow of real life, an ethos felt in the work of road writers from Jack London to Jack Kerouac, manifest in the freshness and immediacy of Bellows’s loose and apparently effortless brushwork. The light on the snow and the smoky sky is beautifully captured.

Bellows went through some odd phases before his premature death in 1925 – compromising his reputation with a series of crude anti-German propaganda works. But here as a young man drinking in the highs and lows of New York life, he doesn’t put a brushmark wrong.